ioSafe N2 - The Performance NAS is now Disaster-proof

Internals

I dedicated an entire page to this because it got, well, interesting. First we will take a look at how we can access the swappable drives. While the original ioSafe was not meant to be user serviceable and sealed the drive in a water proof bag, such methods are not suitable for a hot swap bay setup. This no doubt posed an engineering challenge that the ioSafe folks executed beautifully:

Two screws for the fire resistant front cover...

One screw for the water-tight door...

...and one screw for each drive. Easy. I've seen non-disaster-proof hot swap bays that were more difficult to deal with.

So then I flipped it over and noticed this small vent on the bottom, with what appeared to be a combination heat spreader / sink covering the CPU:

With the lid off, we see the consumable fire brick. This material burns off during a fire, sacrificing itself for what's inside.

With the brick halves split, we see the aluminum (and water tight) enclosure.

Diving deeper, we see the PCB, containing parts lifted from the Synology Diskstation 213.

With the PCB removed we see the business side of things. This is where the CPU, SATA bridge, USB and SD controllers all reside. Realize all of these parts will not survive a fire, but they are not meant to.

Sadly this spreader is very well secured in place by posts which are soldered to the PCB. As we will be returning this unit to ioSafe, I must unfortunately refrain from any permanent modifications.

I almost forgot to show the rear. Here we see the GigE port along with a pair of USB 3.0 ports for the connection of external drives. Apologies for the cylinder head in the background. I was in review-site-disassembly mode and my car got in the way.

Good write up Allyn I think the cost is reasonable considering the quality of product being offered here and lets face it how much importance\value do you place on years of work (your crucial data) being safe in a worst case scenario.